Doses of Daily Life in Beirut

Accepting the absurd for the sake of sanity

Every morning, I start scrolling before my eyes have adjusted to daylight. It’s a horrible habit, sleeping with my phone. I’m afraid not to though. What if something happens in the middle of the night?

I think about people who were thrown across their living rooms on a random August Tuesday, people that were crushed as their buildings collapsed during an earthquake on a February Monday, people that were killed as the collateral damage of a political assassination on a [pick any month/day combo]. As long as I don’t share my bed with anyone else, my phone will remain my bedfellow within reach in case of emergency.

So I wake up and scroll through more mutilated Palestinian bodies. More rubble in the South. The end of Bennifer followed by Israel building a new settlement within a UNESCO World Heritage Site followed by a 2014 press photo of Famke Janssen from X-Men. More murdered kids. The sequence of these images and texts leaves me discombobulated. How do we make sense of this sequence? How do we continue to absorb this stream into our consciousness? It feels like a whisk has been inserted into my ear afterwards. I toss the phone aside.

Penny has been alerted by my alertness and has come to headbutt me until I get out of bed and go to the bathroom. Then, to the kitchen we go but first, I turn off my AC to use the water kettle so I can make my cup of instant coffee. If I don’t do this, bi tik el disjoncteur¹ and I’ll have to get fully dressed just to go flip a switch 5 floors below but I’m lucky to have ten amperes deciding the pace of my life.

I work in media so I have to consume a lot of media to stay on top of the online chatter—or so I tell myself. While I fry an egg with bulghare² cheese, I play YouTube video essays and podcasts about how wedding culture is out of control, the art of showing up, or the coquettification of catholicism. I watch vlogs of YouTubers in New York City, D.C., and Beijing. There is something oddly soothing about listening to the internal monologues of other young women elsewhere as they prepare for a day at Central Park/a marathon/a move to Charleston, Paris, or Berlin. My windows are always cracked in case of explosions or sonic booms so I listen to the thoughts of these strangers while I sweep up cat hair, dust, and soot that has blown in from all the incessant construction and generators that are running nonstop across the city. It’s not even 9:30AM and I’ve already mentally downloaded today’s headlines, trends, hot takes, and conspiracies.

The neighborhood water truck pulls up below and begins to noisily pump gallons into the khazein³ while Matt Bernstein talks about the Kamalification of Brat. I’m guilty of second-screen behavior and I read tweets about strikes (labor and military) at the same time. I tap on “Kfarkila” in my recent Twitter search dropdown and check the latest tweets and then I do it again for “كفركلا” to see the latest Arabic ones.

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We drove there on the morning of the 7th for the olive harvest when the photo of Palestinians busting through the Gaza border fence started to circulate online. The next morning, I woke to distant booms in Shebaa. I think we should leave I say to my dad. He insists it would “take a while for them to get to us” and we could still attend my 24-year-old cousin’s wedding that evening.

“Things don’t happen that fast, relax,” he says insouciantly.

By the time we had returned to Beirut that Sunday night, my nerves were fried but my younger sister insisted I wait at our parents’ house because she was bringing a mango cake that I just had to try.

MABROUK TETA W JEDDO⁴ is written in icing on top. I’m going to be an aunt.

Now, more than 10 months later, I go to my parents’ house to be somewhere other than the artificial cooler that is my bedroom in August. 3ajabitak el mattress?⁵ my dad says to his first and only grandchild resting on his chest. The timeline of this tiny human in front of me is as long as the genocide that is killing thousands of tiny humans in Gaza just 175 miles away.

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I write about wine and culture but I haven’t had a glass of wine in over a month. I have unpublished drafts about last year’s Vinifest (Lebanon’s biggest wine tradeshow), the USAID wine export project, and the winery billboards that have popped up everywhere this summer. All topics seem outdated, tone-deaf, or plain ridiculous but these digestible popcorn pieces can buy me some time for more impactful stuff. Those take more time and energy from my depleted battery because beyond wanting to just write something that’s good, I also have to be mindful of how my audience is reading it. I have to think about what misconceptions I might be unintentionally corroborating and what stereotypes I could be perpetuating when I cover this slice of our part of the world. It’s why publishing anything with weight also requires carrying that weight for weeks before setting it free into the wild.

Majority are people outside of Lebanon. While many are probably members of our diaspora, my audience is made up of people who want to know what’s happening here from their homes abroad

For months, I’ve wanted to write about what Palestinian winemakers are facing given all the coverage Israeli vintners have received but I’m afraid of getting shit wrong or getting flagged as a collaborator for talking to Palestinians vinifying in the Upper Galilee⁶.

I went from fearing that I’m not doing enough to feeling like I’m doing nothing at all.

No one is setting these expectations of me except for, well, me. The privilege of being close enough without being under direct fire (yet) makes me feel like I should be doing more to amplify. Instead, I skim intimidating headlines authored by fellow AMEJA members, rage-read other wine writers’ work, or get lost in a fictional novel.

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It’s too hot to cook these days. My dad calls to ask if I want to go get Whoppers for lunch and I remind him we’re supposed to be boycotting Burger King. “Why should I? Haven’t I sacrificed enough?” he says. “They’re bombing us in the South and I have to give up my burger too?” he continues. I’ve stopped trying to point out the irony in that statement. He lost his first harvest of avocado trees which were planted during the pandemic and he won’t be pressing new olive oil this year. Let him have his Whopper with cheese.

I go to Badaro to meet with my Lebanese friend who’s heading back to London the next day. I check my phone once I’ve parked and see nothing urgent after a quick scroll. I walk to the bar, sit down, and my phone rings. It’s my friend.

“Darabo el 7ara⁷,” he says. His cab has turned back because the driver’s family lives in Dahyeh. My family live on its outskirts. I hang up, call my dad, and walk out as someone walks in saying, “where did they hit?” into his phone.

Everyone’s fine. I drive home. The check-in texts pour in. We are so accustomed to the headcount “are you okay?” messages that some broadcast it over WhatsApp. Optimizing our coping feels gross.

What do you call code-switching that’s for switching from an adrenaline spike to ordering a spicy chicken sandwich? The transition after situational triage where you determine if you’re now in a state of emergency or still in a state of attrition?

“Shu? Ma fi jidar sowt ilyom?”⁸

All we do now is anticipate. We anticipate the next sonic boom, the next targeted car, the next leveled home. We anticipate death on a micro level by jumping at every slammed door and we anticipate it on a macro level by hearing about the inevitable retaliation to the retaliation.

I go to Barzakh and, being the first customer of the day, I can’t leave until they have change for my 20 dollar bill and I’m forced to take an hour of respite with a slice of lemon cake. After a few minutes, I get into my book and lose myself until the itch to pick up my phone disrupts my successful escape. I see a used, illustrated copy of Aesop’s Fables. It’s $9 so if I buy it - for my nephew! I tell myself - they’ll have change for my 20 and I can leave. I flip through it and land on the story of The Kid on the Roof about a goat that teases a wolf from up on the roof above. The wolf calls him out saying he’s only got guts to be snarky because he’s safely out of reach. The moral of the story is typed in italics at the end: It is easy to sound brave when you are not in danger. Sold.

Am I the wolf talking to people abroad or am I the kid thinking I’m tough while the South burns? Or am I the reader observing both from another, disocciated dimension?

The answer is none of the above. In reality, we are all just sitting ducks.

1. You can’t have too many appliances running at once when you’re dependent on a generator. If you do have too many things on, the circuit breaker flips off automatically.

2. Bulgarian sheep or goat cheese similar to Greek feta

3. For their daily use, residents have to regularly refill water barrels that are kept under buildings or on roofs

4. Congratulations Grandma & Grandpa in Arabic

5. Do you like the mattress? in Arabic

6. Even though I would be speaking to Palestinians, I’m worried that a call wouldn’t register that way as the area is considered Israeli (outside of Gaza and the West Bank). Normally, it probably wouldn’t go unnoticed (?) but with our current situation, I imagine comms are being heavily surveilled for informants. In short, I’m paranoid.

7. They hit the neighborhood in Arabic, but the word for neighborhood here usually refers to Haret Hreik or Dahyeh area

8. So? No sonic boom today? in Arabic